


Straw Into Gold

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 21:43:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11067723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: The monster wants a child.





	Straw Into Gold

**Author's Note:**

> RAW is available online (for free/donation, here: http://badinfluencepress.tumblr.com/post/161254576077/two-small-changes), so I've decided to finally post this fic! (As ever, thanks to Aimee and Tea for making RAW so dang amazing.)

The story begins with a monster in a cage. Bound as well as any monster was ever bound. If left alone in the cage, it will surely die. Two women stand just beyond the bars, and one holds a knife and one holds a key.

Anything in my power I will give you, the monster tells them, if you will only let me go.   
  
The first woman asks for a promise. The monster gives it gladly. The second woman asks for the impossible. The monster spins her straw out of gold. They hope for the best, and let the monster go.  
  
*  
  
In the beginning, when Will feels barely human and Hannibal is barely alive, they lie together in the dark. Hannibal rubs his knuckles against Will’s uninjured arm, over and over, as though he’d never torn into a man’s throat while Will opened up his gut. “Stop,” Will tells him finally, catching his hand. Immediately Hannibal folds his own fingers over Will’s. “You need to sleep.”   
  
“It’s hard to give myself up to dreams,” Hannibal replies, morphine making his words slur, his accent thicken. His thumb presses into the soft flesh of Will’s palm. “I keep thinking you’ll be gone when I wake.”   
  
A pang of longing seizes Will, but he’s too exhausted to decide if it’s for the past or the future. Going over the cliff was supposed to be his decision, his surrender and his victory. The ache in his chest is for the loss of that clarity as much as the memory of the dragon’s death. “I’m not going anywhere,” is the response he settles on. “Not tonight.”   
  
“That’s good,” Hannibal says. His forefinger has crept down to the pulse in Will’s wrist, and despite Will’s exhaustion it’s beating too fast. “Will you try to kill me again?”   
  
Had he tried to kill Hannibal? He’d tried to give them an ending. It wasn’t his fault they’d made it to the epilogue. “You’d deserve it if I did,” he replies, vaguely. His eyes have closed all on their own.  
  
“Because of what I did to you.” There’s a thread of something in Hannibal’s voice that might be regret. Then again, it might just be pain. Will doesn’t intend to reply, but Hannibal drags their joined hands up to his mouth, breathes against their tangled fingers. “I’ve forgiven you,” Hannibal says, drugs and injury leaving him raw, too honest. “Won’t you forgive me?”   
  
“I forgive what you did to me,” Will whispers.  
  
“But not what I did to Abigail,” Hannibal sighs. It’s an old hurt, tender to the touch. 

Will tugs his hand away. “Sleep,” he says again, and this time they sleep.

*   
  
Hannibal insists that they recover in a house he knows in the Berkshires. Too few people, Will objects—they’ll stand out. But the house lies in the middle of nowhere, bordered by empty farmland on one side and a national forest on the other. And in the end, Hannibal’s the one who’s done this before.   
  
“It will take Uncle Jack a while to find us here,” Hannibal assures him on the drive up, grey with pain under the ball cap Will has jammed onto his head. He’s in the backseat of their stolen truck, broken leg elevated, watching Will fondly from the rearview mirror. “For one thing, the owner is still alive, and hardly anyone knew we were acquainted. She is on sabbatical in India with her family, and there has been a fatal miscommunication between herself and the alumnus she asked to watch the house. You needn’t worry.”   
  
Will still thinks they’d do better to find a city—it’s easier to disappear in a crowd. Two men living together in a family home? In a small county, where everyone knows everyone? They’ll be noticed.   
  
“Trust me,” Hannibal assures him, wincing as they hit a pothole. “This is the best place for us to be.”   
  
“This professor,” Will says when they arrive—in midafternoon, when no one pays attention to a passing car. The house stands alone before a small garden and the encroaching tangle of a forest. It’s Victorian, black-shuttered. Conspicuous. “How _were_ you acquainted?”   
  
“We had an affair,” Hannibal tells him, smiling faintly at the cobbled path that leads up to the door, even though pushing his wheelchair up it will be painful for them both. “But she is married, and so we were quite discreet.”

The house suits Hannibal: high arching ceilings, a plentitude of lamps creating small pools of light and shadow on the hardwood floors, the garden where deer graze at dusk, the dark forest looming from the windows. It’s easy for Will to imagine Hannibal here with a lover, the comfortable ownership he would take of the elegant kitchen and the cherry-dark master bedroom.   
  
They don’t sleep in the master bedroom. It’s on the second floor, which is currently beyond Hannibal’s reach except by concerted effort. There’s a bedroom on the ground floor that clearly belongs to a young boy—there are cartoon posters on the wall, cheerfully violent books on the shelves. But it has a queen-sized bed and an adjoining bathroom, so it serves their purposes. It amuses Will a little to see Hannibal trapped in a setting so clearly not to his taste, although naturally Hannibal spends most of his time propped up on the white divan in the living room, a scarlet throw in his lap, tablet in his hands and a look of stoic suffering on his features.   
  
But at night, they sleep side by side under a display of action figures. Will needs to reassure himself that Hannibal is still breathing, when he wakes up from dreams of falling, of finding a corpse cold in the bed beside him. Hannibal needs to reassure himself that Will hasn’t changed his mind, hasn’t vanished into the dark.

Will doesn’t think he’ll leave, really. But he can’t deny he’s thought about it. Every time he walks out into the garden it’s a consideration. He could just keep walking. It’s probably already too late to salvage his marriage, but he could save Wally’s memories of him. He could make sure Wally never woke up from a nightmare that Will was in the house, was coming to do the things Tattlecrime said he would do.   
  
Most of the time what keeps him from leaving is the knowledge that Hannibal wouldn’t make it far without him. He tries not to think about this too closely.

*

Will dreams about Abigail. In the dream she’s younger, Wally’s age. Her hair is braided into twin plaits and a child’s hunting jacket is tucked over her shoulders, too big, leaving room for her to grow. But the braids bare the scar tissue where her right ear should be, and the jacket doesn’t hide the ragged wound at her neck. She doesn’t seem to notice. She’s trying to show Will a drawing she made, scrawled in a little blue sketchbook, and Will keeps finding reasons not to look at it. They’re sitting at the wooden table in the kitchen in Minnesota, and Will has papers to grade, doesn’t he? Isn’t it very important that he get to these papers now, hasn’t he kept them for far too long?

 _Dad,_ Abigail keeps saying, _Dad, I want to show you what I made._ Wally calls him Dad. She never did.   
  
I don’t need to see, Will keeps telling her. I already know what you did.   
  
In the corner, Garret Jacob Hobbs is dying on the floor, blood bubbling out of his gut and pooling on the linoleum. He smiles at Will. Will smiles at him.   
  
_You don’t know everything_ , Abigail says, and he returns his attention to her. She’s staring up at him in a familiar sulk, her cheeks and the tip of her nose touched with pink. _If you loved me, you’d want to know._  
  
Will wants to tell her that he does love her, of course he loves her, but he can’t make the words come out of his mouth.   
  
_You’re not my real dad,_ Abigail says, and Garret Jacob Hobbs starts laughing, only it’s not Garret Jacob Hobbs, it’s Mason Verger, laughing through the wreckage of his missing face. He looks Abigail up and down with exaggerated hunger. _Takes after her pop,_ he comments, speech filtered grotesquely through his exposed jaw, and gives Will a wink. _It’s beautiful,_ he says, and a knife sprouts in his chest, a jagged wound opens up in his throat. _Beautiful_.

Abigail grabs Will’s arm, her grip surprisingly strong for such a small hand, and he jolts awake, his heart pounding.   
  
He’s not in Minnesota. He’s in the bedroom of the house in the Berkshires, and it’s Hannibal’s hand on his arm, long fingers digging into his bicep. The bedside clock tells him it’s 2:27 am. He draws in a long, shuddering breath, and Hannibal’s hand drops away.   
  
“What’s wrong,” Will rasps, turning over in bed to look at Hannibal with a clinical eye. Leg elevated, bandage on his side looks okay. His face is pale and creased with pain, but that’s to be expected. “Do you need anything?”

“Nothing is wrong,” Hannibal says after a brief pause. There’s a restrained hunger in the set of his mouth, in his gaze lingering on Will’s brow, as though he wants to peer inside at the workings of Will’s brain. “I thought you might be having a nightmare.”   
  
“Just a dream,” Will says, repressing a shiver. “Did I wake you up?”   
  
“I didn’t mind,” Hannibal says. “Would you like to tell me about it?”  
  
Will considers. Abigail as a child is so vibrant in his mind that he could be examining a memory instead of a constructed image, and the impulse to share that image is tempting—a way to keep it in the world a little longer. But she wasn’t all Abigail. She wore Wally’s clothes, drew in a sketchbook like Wally’s, had something of Wally’s energy in her small, sullen face. He won’t give any piece of his son to Hannibal, no matter how small. “I don’t think I would,” he says.   
  
Hannibal gives him a small nod, but doesn’t look away. He knows there is something else Will wants. Will reminds himself that it’s all right to surrender himself, so long as he surrenders nothing else.   
  
“Sometime,” Will says slowly, giving into an impulse he would ordinarily bury, “I’d like for you to tell me about that last year with Abigail. If you don’t mind.”   
  
“Of course I don’t mind,” Hannibal says. “She was your child.”   
  
She wasn’t. Will knows that now, no matter what his subconscious tells him. The complicated mixture of emotions he felt for Abigail were never reciprocated. Whatever Abigail felt about him, it was not filial. Being Wally’s father taught him that. It occurs to him that Wally probably hates him now. Probably considers his memories of Will just as false as the stories Will’s subconscious tells him about Abigail. Still. If you loved me you’d want to know, she said. He can’t help himself; he wants to know.   
  
“Whenever you like,” Hannibal says. “Just ask.”

*  
  
The dragon left Will with an ugly line of stitches on his jaw, an arm he’ll need physical therapy for in the future, and a memory that leaves Will hollow and aching with want whenever he lets his guard down.   
  
The dragon left Hannibal with an open wound and a nick in his small intestines, but Will is responsible for the majority of Hannibal’s injuries. He has vivid, gory bruising on his legs and a spiral fracture in his left shin from when they crashed into the Atlantic. He’s had two surgeries thus far—Will held a gun to his surgeon’s head—and still sometimes he has fevers in the night. He’s lucky to be alive.   
  
Hannibal claims nothing will aid his recovery like the consumption of bone marrow broth, and so Will takes the side roads an hour and a half to a Stop and Shop one state over to buy soup bones. He fills the cart with ordinary things: salad greens, cereal, coffee filters, sliced bread. Things Hannibal will hate. He does his best to look ordinary as possible, although nothing can be done about his face. A college kid does a double-take in the frozen goods aisle. Maybe she’s shocked by the scar. Maybe not.

“You sure we shouldn’t move on?” he asks Hannibal when returns.   
  
“Not yet,” Hannibal says. “Trust me. We must stay here for now.”

*

Set loose from its cage, the monster finds itself trapped again. This time in an enchanted castle, alone except for one brave child. Such fates seek monsters out. The child has no key, no knife. She is also a prisoner. There is no question that the monster must eat her. How else will it survive? But the girl is brave indeed. She mistakes the monster for a friend, and brings it lingonberries from the tree that grows outside her chamber window, scarlet drops in her snowy palms. She plays music on a golden harp for the monster’s ears, and she falls asleep with her little hands clutched in its fur.   
  
I must eat you, the monster tells the girl. There is nothing either of us can do about that, unless some hero comes to slay me and let you go. But since you have been my friend, I will let you choose what I eat first, and I will take as long as I can before you are gobbled up entirely.   
  
The girl offers him her fingers, but it cannot bear to take them. They are so lovely, and she needs them to pluck berries from the lingonberry tree.   
  
The girl offers him her ears, but it cannot bear to take them. How could she make music to fill the empty halls, without her ears?   
  
Trembling, the girl offers him her feet, and these the monster accepts. She can never run away without her feet.   
  
Eventually it swallows her whole.   
  
*  
  
Will sets the soup bones in the slow cooker. The smell of bone marrow rises into the house, meaty and thick. Commercial meat. They could have come from a Verger farm. Hannibal’s nose suffers more for it than his.   
  
“Next time, would you please find a farmer’s market or a butcher for the meat,” is his only comment, when Will steps into the living room. “I hardly think the FBI will investigate every purchase of organic marrow bones made in the northeastern United States.”   
  
“I’ll think about it,” Will says, just to see the annoyed wince cross Hannibal’s face. He offers Hannibal a glass of water, which deepens Hannibal’s frown. Will likes it—enjoys every sign of Hannibal’s frustration. It’s better to remember that their current equilibrium is built on a false foundation.   
  
“I’m perfectly capable of remembering to take my own medication,” Hannibal says, which means he is well aware of Will’s feelings on the matter. On the white sofa he looks far too pale, the scarlet throw in his lap draining him of color. Visually suggesting exsanguination.   
  
“I couldn’t just want to help?” Will asks, placing the glass on the end table at Hannibal’s side. He sits on the loveseat opposite. They could almost be back in the office in Baltimore.   
  
“How does it feel,” Hannibal asks, as though he has heard Will’s thoughts, “to see me in pain?”   
  
Will leans back in his chair and chooses his words carefully. “I feel a mixture of satisfaction and fear.”   
  
“Satisfied to see me suffering?” Hannibal prods. “Punishment at last for all my sins?”   
  
Will shrugs. There will always be part of him that wants to watch Hannibal die, just as there will always be part of him that wants to kill with him. “In part. Probably.”   
  
“But not entirely,” Hannibal says, and his face shows no emotion at all now, black eyes glittering. “You like seeing me within your power.”   
  
“I’ve been within your power before,” Will reminds him, as though they need reminding. Having control over Hannibal is intoxicating, dangerous because it cannot last—it allows Will to cage the worst parts of what they are so they can continue enjoying the best. Hannibal’s world is narrowed to five rooms and Will’s company. Will can go anywhere, see anyone, if only he chooses. He gets to make and remake that choice every day, while Hannibal has none. It’s a false victory, but it still tastes sweet. “That didn’t end well for me.”   
  
“So this is revenge?” Hannibal asks, allowing a vein of amusement into his voice.   
  
“Whatever this is, I’m trying to extricate us from it,” Will says, nodding at the bottles of pills sitting on the end table. “Take your pill.”   
  
Hannibal tips out the tablet from the appropriate bottle, and stays with it cupped in his hand for a moment, a perfect red sphere in the center of his palm. “You didn’t say why my pain makes you afraid.”    
  
Will actually laughs, although it comes out more bitter than he means it. “Why is anyone afraid when someone they care about is in pain? Take the pill, Hannibal.”   
  
Hannibal tips the pill into his mouth, swallows it down with a sip of water. A thread of pointless frustration coils in Will’s gut. “Thank you,” Hannibal says sincerely.   
  
He doesn’t realize until later, when he’s picking mint leaves in the garden, that he’d entirely missed his opportunity to ask Hannibal how it felt, being so entirely in Will’s power.   
  
*  
  
That night, over dinner, Will asks about Abigail.   
  
“What do you want to know?” Hannibal asks. He’s taking determined sips of the thick yellow broth, sitting up in his wheelchair at the dining room table. Will is seated across from him, eating a microwaved burrito, mostly out of a continued desire to push. Maybe to assert. There’s a potted arrangement of dried flowers between them, and a yellow silk runner crossing the table. Will’s lit the candles. Compromise elevated to the level of farce.   
  
“Everything,” Will says. “Anything.”   
  
Hannibal looks down at his broth, a small smile crossing his face. “I was teaching her the harpsichord, but she was a less than dedicated student. It was a pity. She had the hands for it, and the ear as well.”   
  
Will feels frozen, unprepared, the old wound beginning to crack open. He should have waited for a better moment. He shouldn’t have asked at all. He finds it suddenly unbearable that Hannibal should know these things and he should not. “I didn’t know she was musical.”   
  
“She took piano lessons as a child,” Hannibal confirms, and Will’s mind races stupidly along that track, making connections long since made obsolete. He played the piano. He’d had one, in the house in Virginia. A vision of Abigail, scarred but alive, sitting at the baby grand in his living room, the dogs curled up at her feet, flashes briefly in his imagination. “She was mildly talented and only mildly interested in improvement, but she remembered many of those early songs.”   
  
“Ode to Joy?” Will asks.   
  
“Among others,” Hannibal says with a smile. “Bach’s Prelude in C Minor, and Pachelbel’s Canon in D. As well as Hey Jude and Yesterday, with commendable emotion. I recall some American traditional music as well. Birmingham Jail, O Give Me A Home, Shenandoah.”   
  
“She played a lot,” Will comments. His throat hurts.   
  
“I believe it gave her comfort,” Hannibal says quietly. “Music often soothes us when nothing else will, especially the music we knew as children.”   
  
“You kept her in the house by the bluff?” Will asks, even though he knows the answer is yes.   
  
“I could have shown you her room, if we’d had more time,” Hannibal says, faint reproach shading his voice. “She put up prints of Monet’s water lilies on all four walls. Like the Musée de l’Orangerie in miniature.”   
  
Something catches at the corner of Will’s attention, something he’s been wondering and dreading for a very long time. “Were she and Miriam there at the same time?” he asks, eyes dropping to Hannibal’s hands, the neglected bowl of broth before him.   
  
Hannibal continues to look at him steadily. “Yes. I could have shown you Miriam’s room as well, although she had a great deal less freedom than Abigail. I was never afraid that Abigail would try to leave.”   
  
“You gave her nowhere else to go,” Will manages through his tightening throat.   
  
“I gave her nowhere else to go,” Hannibal agrees. “I also gave her a home, affection, acceptance. I never locked her in. She stayed because she wished to, Will. I don’t deny my manipulation. Don’t deny Abigail ownership of her choices.”   
  
“Did she know about Miriam?” Will presses, and distantly he is aware that he feels nauseous, that his hands are trembling on the tablecloth. “Did she see what you did?”   
  
“Of course she knew,” Hannibal says gently. “I would never hide such a thing from her. She helped me with Miriam, as she helped her father with his prey.”   
  
Will can’t help himself; he buries his face in his hands, taking refuge in temporary darkness. He wanted so badly to protect her—from her father, from Hannibal, from herself, even knowing she was always beyond his help.   
  
“I didn’t lie when I said I felt a tremendous obligation towards Abigail,” Hannibal is continuing. It’s possible he’s been speaking for a while. “I have only ever lied to you when necessity demanded it. I thought of her as my child. I cared for her very much.”   
  
“Then why did you kill her,” Will asks hoarsely, dropping his hand. The expression on Hannibal’s face makes him freeze. It’s grief, muted but genuine.   
  
“You must know I blame you for that,” Hannibal tells him in a low voice, the words all the more horrible for their sincerity.   
  
“I’m going out,” Will says abruptly, and gets up. He leaves the remains of their dinner on the table, leaves Hannibal sitting at the table, leaves the charming house through its charming gate and walks straight through the garden and into the forest.  
  
He walks for a long time before he feels calm, surrounded by maple trees and the familiar sound of the woods at night. He asks himself the usual questions: does he still want to stay? Is he still in conscious control of his actions? He thinks about Molly, brave and beloved and changed forever, about Wally and the drawings in his sketchbook he’ll never see, the games he’ll never watch, the life no one will ever try to share with him. He thinks about Hannibal and Abigail with Miriam Lass. He thinks about timing, how Abigail might have helped Miriam change into the nightgown she was found in, how Hannibal and Abigail together might have gently dropped Miriam into the darkness and the cold and left her there. Trusting that Will would find her. The thought makes him shiver, but not with dread alone.

To his faint surprise, he discovers that the answer to both of his questions is still yes. He wants to stay. He still believes he has some measure of control.

When he comes back to the house, it’s full dark, and Hannibal has moved the dishes into the sink, stored the bone broth in the refrigerator, and taken himself into the child’s bedroom to read before sleep.   
  
“Do you need me to change the dressing on your leg?” Will asks quietly.   
  
“I’ve taken care of it,” Hannibal says, and as if to prove it his calf visibly twitches, making him wince. There’s a titanium rod fastened in his shin, the fractured bones healing around it. The muscles in his leg often seize and spasm after cleaning the incision, as if his body still protests the intrusion, and they can be quite painful. Manipulation of the muscle helps a little.   
  
Will sits at the edge of the bed and reaches for Hannibal’s calf, rucking up the bottom of Hannibal’s pajama pants to give himself access. Hannibal says nothing, but inhales sharply as Will lifts his foot onto his own thigh. He massages the leg very carefully, with an eye on the fading bruises, and Hannibal slowly relaxes, setting his book down and closing his eyes, tipping his head back into the pillow. After a few minutes Will lets him go, gets up to switch off the lamp and change for bed. Hannibal doesn’t move. 

Will gets into bed beside him, his eyes readjusting to the dark. A cartoon monster becomes visible on the opposite wall. “It’s not just Abigail,” he says, almost conversationally. “You’ve cost me two children.”

“Three,” Hannibal corrects him, his voice ever so slightly hoarse. “I did tell Mason about Margot’s child. I wanted to see what he would do.”   
  
Will frowns. “That wasn’t a child, really. That was the possibility of a child.”   
  
“It was a child,” Hannibal says, and there’s real regret in his voice. “I had assumed Alana would tell you, but it seems I expected too much of her. That child was allowed to grow nearly to term.”   
  
Will doesn’t understand. Margot had carried no child—had shown him the scar—she’d been genuinely devastated. “Mason found a surrogate for the embryo?” he clarifies.   
  
“For the greater part of the pregnancy I am certain he did just that,” Hannibal says. “But on the day he meant to kill us both, he found a second surrogate for the Verger heir. Margot and Alana found the child inside a pregnant sow. He was dead for only a few minutes before they made their discovery.”   
  
It’s too ludicrous and too horrible for Will to quite believe, but his brain takes up the challenge anyway: the enormous pink belly of the sow, the small child curled up inside. Mason would have done it. It suited his sense of humor perfectly. His sister’s child inside a pig. It explains why Alana dropped contact after Will left, without so much as an apology for almost getting him killed. The combination of guilt and horror made people do funny things.   
  
“You said he,” Will begins, and then stops, at a loss.

“I believe the child was a boy,” Hannibal tells him. “Margot was quite distraught when she came to set me free.”   
  
“A boy,” Will repeats.   
  
“I’m sorry, Will,” Hannibal says in the dark. “I truly did think Alana would tell you.”   
  
Will nods, rolls over onto his side, faces the wall. Quid pro quo, he thinks distantly, apology for apology. Truth for truth.   
  
Sometime in the night, Will becomes aware that Hannibal is touching him. Not much. There are three points of contact at the small of his back. Hannibal has one hand stretched deliberately out across the bed between them, touching Will with the very tips of his longest fingers.   
  
“Tell me something else about Abigail,” Will murmurs, still half in a dream. Instead of letting his hand slip away, Hannibal presses it firmly against Will’s back, a solid pressure.   
  
He falls asleep to Hannibal describing Abigail’s favorite dishes, her delight in flaming custard, her unreasonable dislike for jicama and water chestnuts, how when he asked if there was anything she’d like she’d told him in a very wistful way that she wanted macaroni and cheese.

*   
  
The monster wants a child, so it lures another girl and tricks her. The girl begs and begs but it makes no difference. You wouldn’t know how to care for it, the girl argues. I know about care, the monster tells her. You wouldn’t know how to love it, the girl says. I know about love, the monster says. I have tasted it. I have swallowed it. At last the girl says please, please, for my sake, let me keep my child. I have spun you gold, the monster says, I have given you knives, I have given you time. Now give me the child. 

*   
  
The FBI do not find them. Hannibal does not succumb to infection. Will asks again if Hannibal wants to move on, and again Hannibal refuses. Instead Will learns what books Abigail read in that year ( _Le Ton Beau de Marot_ and _Confessions of A Mask_ on Hannibal’s recommendation, _Swamplandia!_ and _The Prisoner of Azkaban_ of her own volition) and what films she asked Hannibal to find for her ( _A Little Princess_ , _The Secret of Roan Inish_ , _The Labyrinth_ ) what good progress she made with French, how much she looked forward to living in Paris. Hannibal parcels out the facts of Abigail’s life as carefully as Scheherazade, making certain that each story bleeds into the next. Giving Will a reason to return, he thinks, should the answers to his questions one day be no.   
  
“Will you tell me something about your life with Molly?” Hannibal asks, once, an attempt to shift the balance they’ve struck between Will’s pain and Hannibal’s memories. Will is chopping onions, glad that their smell briefly disguises the continued aroma of marrow in the house. The exertion of following Will into the kitchen has left Hannibal too pale and exhausted to help, but apparently not enough to discontinue the conversation. “Or perhaps about Walter, your other child?”   
  
“No,” Will says, and on this there can be no compromise. When he finds himself breaking this rule, that’s when he’ll leave.   
  
“You continue to wear your wedding ring,” Hannibal notes softly, but the expression he wears is openly hungry. “Do you still consider yourself married?”   
  
“I’m sure Molly’s working on a divorce in absentia,” Will says, and scoops up the onions in both palms, drops them into the bottom of a soup pot.   
  
“I didn’t ask about Molly.”   
  
Will reaches for the bag of carrots he’d left on the counter. He’s making vegetable soup, balancing the Stop and Shop carrots with wild garlic and zucchini from the garden. “I consider myself forsworn.”   
  
“But you miss them,” Hannibal says. It’s not a betrayal to admit it. He’s been willing to sacrifice every piece of himself to Hannibal for a very long time. He’s still not willing to sacrifice anyone else.   
  
“Don’t worry about it,” Will says instead, putting his back to Hannibal, picking up the knife.   
  
*   
  
That night, Hannibal tells him about exhuming Garret Jacob Hobbs and putting his knife in Abigail’s hands. Will starts shaking as he tells the story, the familiar urge to bolt crawling inside him, and Hannibal reaches out and wraps his hand around Will’s throat. They both go completely still. Hannibal waits, leaving his hand where it is. Will finally manages to nod. The threat is enough to steady Will, enough to let him lie there and listen to the rest of it: how Abigail wept, how she took the knife in her hands, how she returned her father’s love to him.

“I told her that every family expresses love in their own unique way,” Hannibal murmurs, his fingers flexing lightly against Will’s rapid pulse. “She told me that she loved her father, that she knew he loved her. She said he did the best he could.”   
  
“You killed her,” Will says, and the words come out lost, misplaced.   
  
“We killed her together,” Hannibal says, and Will sees it again: Abigail walking willingly to Hannibal’s hand, Will begging for her life. Hannibal her father slicing her throat. Will her father dying on the kitchen floor. Abigail his daughter gasping, all three of them helpless, returned to the moment when they found each other. “But I believe at the end she understood she was loved.”   
  
Will wrenches his mind’s eye away from Abigail’s bloodless corpse, fixes it on Wally, flushed and happy in his mother’s house, playing with Will’s dogs. “That’s not love,” he whispers. “That’s poison.”   
  
“She understood it as love,” Hannibal says, and instead of tightening his grasp he turns it into a caress, his index finger tracing a ragged line across Will’s throat, where Abigail’s scars would be. “Such things are subjective, as you know. Who is to impose a single definition on human emotion?” 

Will turns his head away as though that will make Hannibal stop, and Hannibal’s thumb strokes briefly at the curve of his jaw. “Are you angry that you didn’t have the same chance?” Hannibal asks, and his voice could not be called anything but tender. “Are you angry that she died without knowing the care you felt for her?”   
  
“ _Yes_ ,” Will says, giving in, and without thinking about it at all he tears Hannibal’s hand away and moves until he’s leaning over Hannibal, his forearm pressed to Hannibal’s windpipe. Hannibal smiles up at him, his eyes liquid in the dark.   
  
“I took that from you,” Hannibal says, and Will presses down, listens to the sound of Hannibal’s breath becoming more labored. Hannibal keeps talking, although his voice is strained. “We shattered her completely, past all hope of resurrection. But if I could—“ he’s gasping for air between words now, his hands clenched in the fabric of Will’s shirt, “—if I could do it again, Will. Have we learned from the past? Would you stay?” It’s impossible, but Will longs for it anyway: Abigail returned a third time from death, smiling and adult and more Hannibal’s daughter than his. He’d stay forever, then, and Hannibal knows it.   
  
“Yes,” Will says again, and allows Hannibal to tug him down and press a fervent kiss to the corner of his mouth. They haven’t done this before. It feels like the beginning of their ending, the last temptation before he’ll have to choose once and for all between death and life. It feels good. Will pulls back his arm, and Hannibal gasps and gasps, hot pulses of breath against Will’s cheek. He kisses Will again, once, twice, hands coming up to cradle Will’s skull. Will lets himself return the kiss—just for a moment—and Hannibal’s chest hitches beneath him, his breathless mouth opening up, and the curl of elation and possession in Will’s belly is too much like ripping the Dragon’s throat open with his teeth, like spilling the Dragon’s guts, like the sheer fucking beauty of sharing that much with someone who loves him. Will breaks away, gasping, and returns to his side of the bed.   
  
“Are you satisfied?” Hannibal asks hoarsely. “Does it suit your need to both devour and resist, when you deny me?”   
  
When Will doesn’t answer, Hannibal returns with a question. “There’s a farmer’s market tomorrow,” he says, and names a town about an hour away. “Will you go for me? I would like to eat real food again.”   
  
“Yes,” Will says, and when Hannibal thanks him he sounds very tired.   
 

*   
  
The farmer’s market is a small one, and not entirely up to Hannibal’s standards. Will is picking through a selection of unimpressive greens when he looks up and sees the reason Hannibal sent him. Very likely the reason Hannibal picked the house in the Berkshires in the first place. Why he never wanted to move on.  
  
Margot Verger is standing not twenty feet away from him, looking at a display of artisanal honey. She hasn’t seen him. There’s a child with her. A boy, dark haired and pale, playing a game on Margot’s phone. He’s at least three years old. Maybe four.  
  
A boy, Hannibal said. Dead for mere minutes before Margot and Alana found him.  
  
_Good for me_ , Alana had told him in her office, a smile on her face that told Will there was a lie somewhere in her sentence. _I carried him_. At the time he’d just assumed she wasn’t as happy as she wanted him to believe. But any child Alana carried would be younger. Much younger. She’d still been recovering from reconstructive surgery three years ago. Alana’s child would be a baby still.   
  
The boy shouts with frustration as something goes wrong with his game, and he looks up from the phone. His gaze catches on Will, because Will is doing a bad job of blending, is standing still in the middle of the market staring. His eyes are blue, like Wally’s, like Abigail’s. That’s my child, Will thinks, prodding an injury to see how much it hurts. That’s my son. It hurts, but nowhere near as much as he thought it would. He supposes he’s well-scarred. Margot says something over her shoulder, and the child slips his hand into hers. Alana isn’t with them. 

If I could do it again, Hannibal said. Would you stay?  
  
Will’s breath catches in his chest, and he abandons his purchases, flat-out runs back to the truck. There are a thousand reasons for Alana to miss the farmer’s market with her family, but only one is true. There will be some inexorable reason for her to drive out alone to the house at the edge of the forest. Hannibal will keep two promises today.   
  
He turns it over and over in his head on the drive back, breaking every traffic law he can get away with: the promise Margot must have extracted from Hannibal before she let him go, the time Hannibal must have spent saving the baby’s life before he bothered carving up Cordell. How that must have delighted him. Another shattered teacup come back together all on its own. Another opportunity to bind Will to him more tightly than love or hatred or anything else they have tried so far. Hannibal has been planning this, Will realizes, since he first believed they both would live. His hands start shaking on the steering wheel. He pushes harder on the gas.

*

The girl discovers the monster’s true name, and wins back her child. The monster, enraged, stamps so hard upon the ground that it splits itself in two. Nothing can put it together again.   
  
*  
  
When he returns to the house by the woods, there’s another car in the driveway, and the front door is ajar. He draws his gun, dread tightening the muscles in his shoulders, and heads for the kitchen. There’s nowhere else they could be.   
  
Hannibal is in his wheelchair, sweat beading on his brow, a gun in one hand and a knife in the other. It must bother him, needing to rely on the threat of bullets. He doesn’t like guns, but he’s in no position to give chase. It’s a compromise.   
  
Alana is collapsed on the kitchen floor, her back against the stove. A trail of blood leads down the white porcelain to her shoulder, where she’s trying to staunch a bullet wound. A look of utter devastation crosses her face when she sees it’s Will. “Please,” she says, her voice rough with tears, “Please don’t hurt my family.”   
  
He doesn’t greet her. He keeps his gun pointed at Hannibal. “Let her go,” he says.   
  
“I didn’t expect you back for another hour,” Hannibal says. He’s got one hand pressed to the wound in his side—probably Alana struck him, before he shot her. “I thought you’d at least speak to Margot before declining my gift.”

 

“I don’t want it,” Will says, but his voice cracks on the word _want,_ and Alana flinches. “Please,” she says again, and Will makes himself ignore her. He’s lying, and all three of them know it. Of course he wants to know his child. But he’s good—so good—at refusing what he wants. “Hannibal,” he says instead, his mouth dry as a bone, afraid as he has not been since Jack told him his wife and son were attacked, “I can’t stay with you if you do this.”   
  
“That’s a clumsy threat,” Hannibal says, and the calm in his voice finally splinters, reveals a glimpse of the rage beneath. “You are going to leave me regardless. As you did before.”   
  
“You’re making the same mistake,” Will whispers, and takes a step towards Alana. Hannibal’s hand is shaking with exhaustion, but he fires a shot into the stove beside her head. Alana screams and presses a hand to her mouth. Will knows instantly that Hannibal’s body is already betraying him: he meant to blow a hole through Alana’s ear.

 

They both freeze, and for a moment the only sound in the room is Alana sobbing for breath. “I can’t keep coming back here,” Will says, and there are tears springing to his eyes—for himself, for Abigail, for the helpless way Hannibal keeps returning them to the scene of their loss.   
  
“Would you be satisfied if I gave you an end?” Hannibal asks, and his eyes are red with disappointment. And isn’t that what Will wanted, on the cliff? To never be faced with this decision?   
  
“I might,” Will says, and the words come out scraped and raw. “You wouldn’t be.” Hannibal’s eyes widen, and his hand twitches on the gun a second before he brings the barrel away from Alana, towards Will. His lips part, but Will doesn’t hear him. The punishing clarity he’d felt on the cliff is filling up his chest, measuring need against need, promising power, promising beauty. A terrible expression of love, but violence is what they understand. He shifts the balance of power in his favor, rejects the ending entropy has determined for them, and pulls the trigger.   
  
*   
  
After he applies a field dressing to Alana’s shoulder, after he swears she’ll never see him again, after he begs her to let him go and she reluctantly agrees. After that, he goes back into the kitchen, where Hannibal lies bleeding on the floor, sucking in breath after terrible breath. The bullet went into Hannibal’s left thigh, lodging in the bone. He’ll need another surgery. He’ll need Will to care for him.   
  
Will kneels beside him, looks him carefully over. The side wound is bleeding again, his broken leg seizing. He’s grey with blood loss, breath seeping out of him and rattling back in. “Is this how you propose to solve our problem?” Hannibal breathes, sounding very nearly dreamy with shock. “I don’t know what I—what I make of your solution.”   
  
Will packs the new wound with ice. He leans over to brush Hannibal’s hair out of his eyes, and winds up leaving bloody streaks on his brow. Hannibal’s eyes are dilated with agony, his mouth is soft with betrayal. “This is how I keep you,” Will says, and his mind is still empty and clear as a glass. He reaches for Hannibal’s slack hand, and grips it hard.   
  
Hannibal’s lips part briefly, his eyes drift shut. “You’ll stay with me,” he whispers.   


“I’ll stay,” Will promises, and he will.

*

Split apart, the torn halves of the monster regard each other. Death can create life, half of the monster says. We have what we wanted. We have company. We will live together, ever after.   
  
The other half of the monster is wiser. But I will always be missing you, it says.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is loved. <3


End file.
